Keynote Speakers
Jim Hendler (Rensselaer): "Why the Semantic Web will never work"
Abstract
TBA
About Jim Hendler
James Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Assistant Dean for Information Technology and Web Science, at Rensselaer. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), serves as a Director of the UK's charitable Web Science Trust and is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technology at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Hendler is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society and the IEEE. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. In 2010, Hendler was named to the "honor roll" of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine.
Hendler also serves as an "Internet Web Expert" for the US government, providing guidance to the Data.gov project.
Abe Hsuan (Irwin & Hsuan LLP): The Pirated "I" or How Privacy Can't Exist on a Lawless Semantic Web
Abstract:
An explosion of digital information about us exists and persists in the databases of the businesses, governments and networks we engage with daily. Most all of it does not identify us personally. Existing legal regimes approach "privacy" by regulating how specific bits and bytes of Personally-Identifiable Information (PII), such as names, addresses, government-issued IDs, email addresses, etc., can and should be used, stored and shared. However, advancements in knowledge discovery and data-mining (KDD) technologies and the advent of the semantic web mean that PII is no longer needed to know with sufficient certainty an individual's likes, dislikes, socio-economic status, residence, politics, religion, addictions, etc. As we use our mobile devices, surf the web, send messages, shop for necessities like food, clothing and medicine, consume media, or simply walk on the streets of any large city in the world (and many small towns as well), we open ourselves up to having our identities "pirated" for both wanted and unwanted purposes. What can the law do about this fast-arriving future when we can no longer reasonably expect our privacy to be protected or protectable?
About Abe Hsuan
Abe Hsuan is a founding partner of the law firm Irwin & Hsuan LLP where he specializes in advising private equity and start-up clients in the areas of Internet, technology, data management and privacy laws. He has held senior legal positions at several major online and traditional media companies (Oxygen Media, LinkShare, Scholastic), was a Managing Director of an early-stage technology venture fund and incubator (VennWorks) and began his legal career at the international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. He has been a member of the Association of Corporate Counsel, the International Trademark Association, the American Intellectual Property Law Association and the Bar Association of the City of New York. Mr. Hsuan served as a Lecturer for the Practicing Law Institute in 2004 on the then-recently enacted U.S. anti-spam laws. That same year, he was honored by the New York County Lawyers' Association as a celebrated lawyer of color. Mr. Hsuan holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.
Prasad Kantamneni: "Seeing Vs. Noticing: Helping users find and use information quickly"
Abstract
Often times, businesses balance multiple goals when designing products. In the process of balancing these goals, we sometimes loose sight of our customer, and sacrifice creativity. In this talk Prasad Kantamneni will share his experiences and lessons learned in the course of delivering a great user experience to billions of users a month. He will share case studies and processes for using diverse sets of data to make quick decisions without loosing sight of the customer, compromising on creativity, or loosing revenue. He will also share ways to quantify the value of user experience after a product is launched.
About Prasad Kantamneni
Prasad Kantamneni is a User Experience consultant specializing in data driven design. He was the principal architect of the Eye-Tracking platform at Yahoo!, and built the Yahoo! Human Perception Center of Excellence. His work at Yahoo! led to significant user experience and revenue improvements. He has also worked and consulted with a number of companies including Honeywell, Lexis Nexis, and eBay. One of the achievements he is most proud of, is using research to build a case and drive the launch of the search assistance feature (also known as search suggestions) at Yahoo!. This allowed Yahoo! be the first search engine to deploy the Search Assistance feature -- a feature that is now synonymous with searching.
Andraž Tori (Zemanta): "Quantity vs. quality on the consumer web"
Abstract
Do you like content farms? You are helping them succeed. Every improvement in open structured data, machine learning and NLP gives rouge web players an ammo in the battle against search engines and users. On the other hand many owners of the curated and high quality data aren't (yet) reaping benefits from those technologies. At time of this writing Demand Media has the same market cap as New York Times. So let's look at the good, the bad and the ugly on the web. Who are real beneficiaries of semantic web and related tech? Where are they hiding?
About Andraž Tori
Andraž Tori co-founded Zemanta in 2007 where he serves as a CTO. He architected Zemanta's semantic-based analysis& discovery engine. Prior to that he hosted TV show on information technologies at Slovenian national television (2002-2007). There he noticed the opportunity for authoring tools that understand text content. He also co-founded and was a program manager of the most successful Slovenian cyber-center Kiberpipa (2001-2007).
Andraz has been programming since he was 10 and has a formal computer science background. However his diverse interests also drove him to acquire non-tech skills. His mission is to take state of the art tech and hide it behind simplest possible user interface.
Lars Backstrom (Facebook): "Dealing with structured and unstructured data at Facebook"
Abstract
Facebook has undergone tremendous growth in the last five years. Here we will start by looking at some basic statistics and trends that have accompanied this growth. We'll then dive into two different topics. First, we will look at a general trend to make data more structured at Facebook. Having more structured data makes it easier to manage, understand, and leverage it. I will briefly discuss the tools (Hive) that have been built to enable the massive-scale data analysis that goes on at Facebook on a daily basis.
In the second part of the talk, I will dive into the details of one of the systems that has contributed to the growth of Facebook: People You May Know. This system generates a significant number of the friend connections on Facebook, and by using increasingly sophisticated machine learning techniques, we have been able to make large improvements to the ranking used by the system since its original launch.
About Lars Backstrom
Lars Backstrom is a Data Scientist at Facebook, where he works on data analysis and machine learning systems. Since joining Facebook, he has made significant improvements to the friend suggestion ranking system. He is responsible for the backend system which does feature extraction and ranking of the friends of friends of over 500 million users (times an average of 40,000 friends of friends means 20 trillion rankings). Before joining Facebook in 2009, Lars was a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, where he developed algorithms for data mining in social networks, query logs, and server logs.
Jure Leskovec (Stanford University): " Rhythms of Information Flow through Networks "
Abstract
The information we experience online comes to us continuously over time, assembled from many small pieces, and conveyed through our social networks. This merging of information, network structure, and flow over time requires new ways of reasoning about the large-scale behavior of information networks.
I will discuss a set of approaches for tracking information as it travels and mutates in online networks. We show how to capture and model temporal patterns in the news over a daily time-scale -- in particular, the succession of story lines that evolve and compete for attention. I will also discuss models to quantify the influence of individual media sites on the popularity of news stories and algorithms for inferring latent information diffusion networks.
About Jure Leskovec
Jure Leskovec is assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University where he is a member of the InfoLab and the AI lab. He joined the department in September 2009. In 2008/09 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University working with Jon Kleinberg and Dan Huttenlocher. Jure completed his Ph.D. in Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Christos Faloutsos in September 2008. He did his undergraduate in computer science at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and now also collaborates with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Chris Welty (IBM Research) - Dinner Keynote
About Chris Welty
Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications.
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COIN The mission of the Coin IP is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support the above 2020 vision, starting from notable existing research results in the field of Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration.
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Elsevier Elsevier is the world's leading provider of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, tools and resources. A global company based in Amsterdam, Elsevier partners with scientists, researchers, healthcare providers, educators and decision-makers in academic institutions, governments and corporations to help them find, evaluate and use information. Our breadth of content is unparalleled, spanning virtually every STM field in the world. Using innovative technology, we deliver our content through tools that help our customers be more productive and successful in their work. ScienceDirect our premium online portal delivers the worlds' leading journals electronically to over 11 million readers in 200 countries. Elsevier is looking at how in the contemporary scientific environment we can meet the real challenge to provide efficient access: eliminating research obstacles by creating a new kind of knowledge ecosystem that is integrated, intelligent, trustworthy and open to innovative applications.
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FORTH Since its establishment in 1983, the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH has had a relatively long history and recognized tradition in conducting basic and applied research, developing applications and products, providing services, and playing a leading role in Greece and internationally, in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies. It is the top rated research institute in Greece in the area of ICT, and represents Greece within the ERCIM network of European ICT institutes. Its Information Systems Laboratory combines expertise in knowledge representation and reasoning, database systems, web-based information systems and conceptual modelling, and is one of the leading research groups in the area of the semantic web.
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Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN) Founded in 1988, the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN) is a non profit scientific organization devoted to organizing and promoting AI (Artificial Intelligence) research in Greece and abroad. Since its establishment, EETN has participated in the organization of various national and international events related to AI and its subfields. EETN is also interested in promoting AI in higher education and in exploiting AI research results by commercial organizations. The recent, rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has intensified the need for intelligent information systems and increased commercial interest in the area of AI.
Since 1996, EETN is a member of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), whose international prestige is similar to the one of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). EETN's participation in ECCAI, as an equal society member, as well as the organization of EETN conferences (SETN), workshops and summer schools has significantly upgraded its role.
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INSEMTIVES INSEMTIVES combines research with development and real-world applications. The foundations are methods and guidelines facilitating semantic content creation in an incentives-driven manner. They underly the INSEMTIVES platform (back-end) and various end-user tools for semantic content creation (front-end).These technology components are used in three case studies targeting the management of enterprise content, the annotation of Web service artifacts, and the management of multimedia in online worlds and games.
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IOS Press IOS Press - (co-)publishes around 100 international journals, ranging from computer science and mathematics to medicine and the natural sciences and 100-125 book titles a year. 2010 sees the launch of the new journal Semantic Web. Commencing its publishing activities in 1987, IOS Press services a variety of scientific and medical communities in all parts of the world. IOS Press is a fast growing publishing company, which follows the developments in publishing closely. All journals are available online and an online book platform was launched in 2006.
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LarKC The aim of the EU FP 7 Large-Scale Integrating Project LarKC is to develop the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced “lark”), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web.
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LOD2 The outputs of this project will range from sci-tech to socio-economic areas by providing new technologies and an underlying scientific basis for these and by applying these new technologies to a number of Semantic Web areas experiencing commercial (enterprise search, media and publishing), scientific (extraction, interlinking, ontology classification and fusion methods), and sociological (community knowledge, integration in social networks, eGovernment) success at present. The project aims to contribute high-quality interlinked versions of public Semantic Web data sets, promoting their use in new cross-domain applications by developers across the globe. The new technologies for enabling scalable management of Linked Data collections in the many billions of triples will raise the state of the art of Semantic Web data management, both commercial and open-source, providing opportunities for new products and spin-offs, and make RDF a viable choice for organizations worldwide as a premier data management format.
The algorithms and (open-source) tools that the project will develop for data cleaning, linking and fusing will help creating and bootstrapping new data sets in domains that go much beyond the direct applications and data sets developed in the context of this project, to reach the overall goal of the project of making Linked Data the model of choice for next-generation IT systems and applications. -
Ontotext Ontotext is the developer of several outstanding products and major contributor to open-source platforms. It is a proven, competent and cost-effective, partner in:
- Development of tools and solutions based on semantic technologies
- Software engineering, performance optimization, ontology design
- Analysis, evaluation, feasibility studies based on cutting-edge expertise
The technology delivers real-world applications in Web Services and Enterprise Application Integration, Knowledge Management and Textmining, Business Intelligence, Media Research, and Life sciences. Ontotext carries out research in: NLP, information retrieval, ontology design and management, knowledge representation and reasoning, semantic web services and business process management (BPM). It is taking part in research projects with total budget of more than 100 million EURO. As a member of W3C we are involved in the development of the vision and the standards powering the development of the web.
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Pascal2 Pascal 2 The PASCAL Network of Excellence has created a distributed institute pioneering principled methods of pattern analysis, statistical modeling, and computational learning as core enabling technologies for multimodal interfaces that are capable of natural and seamless interaction with and among individual human users. The resulting expertise has been applied to problems relevant to both multi-modal interfaces and cognitive systems. PASCAL2 will enable a refocusing of the Institute towards the emerging challenges created by the ever expanding applications of adaptive systems technology and their central role in the development of large scale cognitive systems. Furthermore, the funding will enable the Institute to engage in technology transfer through an Industrial Club to effect rapid deployment of the developed technologies into a wide variety of applications, while undertaking a brokerage of expertise and public outreach programme to communicate the value and relevance of the achieved results.
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PlanetData The PlanetData project is built around three objectives that together ensure the creation of a durable community made up of academic and industrial partners. This community will be supported in conducting research in the large-scale data management area through the provision of data sets and access to tailored data management technology. It will benefit from a comprehensive program of training, dissemination, standardization, and networking activities, intended to strengthen existing collaborations and establish new ones, to educate organizations in key questions related to open data exposure, and to transfer research results towards industry.
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Talis The Talis Platform is an open technology platform for mass collaboration and human-centric and information-rich applications. A platform for semantic applications, it combines Semantic Web, information retrieval, collective intelligence and behavioral mining technologies. Provides data management, organization and analysis components that can learn and understand patterns of behavior and present them through an API to be interwoven appropriately into any application. Interaction with the Talis Platform is via a suite of RESTful Web services.
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VideoLectures.NET VideoLectures.NET is a free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users' comments.